Very nice!

And, I know this wasn't really a post about rules, but the Passport mentioned sounds interesting. Does it get added to as the game progresses?

Are the illo characters based on real people? The guy on the right reminds me of someone from Story Games.

Hey Daniel. Overall, awesome! I really like a lot of the choices you've made here (personally, I like the sepia colors and think blue might look too cold) and the only problem that really stands out for me is the lack of uniform spacing around the vertical and horizontal lines you're using to break up the text on the second example.

-- There's way more space below the headline (between it and the chapter summary) than above it, so it looks squeezed in from the top.
-- In the text below, there's a lot of space on both sides of your centered sidebar there, but none at the top of the sidebar, where the column text just sits on it.
-- Also, there is very little spacing at all between the text columns and the horizontal bar that separates them, above the sidebar.

Generally, the page on the left is really, really dense and hard to parse, like you're trying to cram a lot of text in a huge variety of formats onto a single page (justified top inscription, centered headline, centered description, justified tetris-piece-shaped left column, centered sidebar heading, in-text bold sidebar subheadings, unjustified sidebar text, justified tetris-piece-shaped right column, and then, on the next page, a switch to unjustified single-column text). That's a lot of variation and changes to parse on a single spread. If you're ultimately gonna make it really sing, I think a bit more spacing around some of the elements would be really helpful.

I also have no idea when in my reading of the page I'm supposed to read the sidebar, coming as it does between two columns. I really like the look of it, but it takes a while to get used to. I'm not sure I have any really great suggestions there, except maybe you could refer directly to the sidebar at the end of a paragraph within the body of the text, so the reader can stop, read the sidebar, and then start with a fresh paragraph of body text. You see what I'm saying?

The word spacing is really distracting. I also try to minimize my hyphenation, but it's better to have hyphens than huge gaps between words on the same sentence.

A slightly blasphemous solution that a ton of professional typographers grudgingly use is this: allow your glyphs to scale between 97% and 103% for body text, and allow your spaces to scale between 80% and 120%. You might need to tweak it a bit from there. I doubt you'll notice anything different except better word spacing.

Also, the space on either side of the middle division is unequal, and I'd play around with tracking (or adding big words where small ones will do) enough to get the words to fill to the last line on that page.

I'd get rid of the stains entirely,

Note that, while I agree with Shreyas in most respects, I feel that unjustified text is -- in most cases --- an abomination in the sight of God (I like nice, uniform rectangular shapes), so be aware of that bias on my part.

Lots of stuff to love in this design. I agree with the overall comments here.

The headline and secondary headline typeface is really... uh, rigid. Seems like, given the focus of this game on handwritten letters, you might want a really beautiful calligraphic, handwritten treatment of the chapter head, at least.

Wow, so much feedback! Okay, I'll try to respond to everyone.

Colin: I've been cheekily referring to the character sheet as a passport, but I haven't quite figured out how to make that metaphor really work. As far as the illos go, I dunno if Liz based them on real people. Knowing Liz, she probably worked her friends into the art in lots of places.

Remi: You're right about the serenity. I was thinking of this as the baseline background on which I'd layer scraps of paper and stuff. It's funny though, some folks think there's already too much going on on the page. I'm going to try to work in more passport/postal stamps and textures. Any other suggestions to make this more anarchic? (Great choice of words, btw.)

Jonathan: I'm revisiting the spacing now, especially having looked at how Luke Crane handled his white space in Mouse Guard. He has like half an inch more room around the sides than I do. As for the sidebars, I am kind of in the GURPS mindset with sidebars, where I read them as independent chunks of text from the main body copy. I hadn't considered people trying to weave the sidebar into the text as part of their reading, thanks for pointing that out to me.

Shreyas: Good call on the symmetry of the staining. I was actually looking at old books though, and their stains do tend to have a symmetrical quality if the book was closed while being submerged in water or something. However, I can break up the monotony by working in some spot stains with tea and seasonings, like you're saying. Heck, ink splatters wouldn't be uncalled for either. Any other thoughts on what kind of damage a pilgrim's book might get during her journey?

Shreyas & Jonathan: I demand that you knife fight to settle your dispute over justified text.

Brennan: The rivers of space in the body copy might be because I'm using lorem ipsum for the dummy text, which is kind of notorious for not having the same word length as actual written English. I'm going to test it out with actual copy and work in your scaling solution, too. (I'm keeping the stains though, sorry. ;) )

Nathan: It's hard to not look like White Wolf when you have a two-column layout. The one thing I'm doing to avoid that is trying to make the illustrations look more like they were actually drawn into the book, so no borders or hard edges around them. The text above the headline is a little bit of flavor text at the beginning of each chapter, hopefully elaborating upon the artwork in the double-page spread and segueing into the chapter's subject matter.

Matt: Thanks very much for the kind words! The text is already 10 pt and I'm aiming to include a slightly youngish audience so I'm worried that going smaller might make it harder for them to read. Then again, that's all the more reason to space out the text more and reduce the width of the columns as others in this thread have suggested.

John: You are so right. I've been tinkering with some calligraphic capital letters and that might be an opportunity to work them in.


Danny: Thanks for pointing out the difficulty of tracking where the middle-bar should be read, I'll rearrange things and space them out a bit more across more pages for the sake of example. Unfortunately, I will probably be incorporating more calligraphic elements into the opening chapter page, but they'll be limited and used judiciously. Don't worry, you don't sound like a cranky old man at all. :)

The art is wonderful! :o

With the disclaimer that I don't have a clue when it comes to design -- I do feel that having a dominant headline over multiple columns makes the bottom left page a little too newspapery. Aren''t newspapers antithetical to the implied setting, or are my expectations just way off? If this were, say, one of the books in the temple library, I'd expect the primary headlines to look more like how the secondary headline looks. Or else, if the primary headlines are important enough to be that dominant, then you might combine them with a picture and lots of white space for an Oxherding/Ten Bulls of Zen woodcut effect. Basically, add a whole 'nother page for each primary title-picture combo, and let the body text have its own page.

Change nothing; go to press immediately.

(My lack of patience may be showing. I'm a child of my times.)

I like the square. I like the colours, and the neatness. I don't like the uneven spacing between words. In some books, and this seems to be rather close, one sentence has huge gaps, and another has all the words on top of one another.

Definite improvement, but I was happy with the first one (mostly--nit picks). Speaking of nits:
* If you tilt the background "sheets of paper" in the callouts, the text should also tilt. It's odd that the text stays squared.
* I'd make the right page headers mirrors of the left. Either way, I would avoid totally overlaying the headers or muddling them with background effluvia. They are, primarily, a reference tool, and as such need to be scanable.
* Pick three base colors, I think. Green, tan, read (and black) are plenty without blue and purple passport stamps and pink sheets-of-paper backgrounds. That, or balance the colors on each spread--the third one above drags my eyes STRAIGHT to the purple stamp.

But, yeah, you got NO more problem with pages being blurs of "gray" text blocks. You may have gone a bit TOO far in the other direction, but no one will complain if every spread is a feast for the eyes... so long as each is unique enough in image distribution and positioning of sidebars that they are quickly scanned.

Excellent, though. Makes me realize that I'm WAY out of practice (or behind the times). Damned tech writing kills the soul....

Daniel, I don't really have a useful critique... I just wanted to chime in and say that the multi-colored text (and the stamps) looks really, really good. Loving it.

Not a fan of the post-it's (I know it isn't) font colour. I have no problem with different font colours, so long as none of them are light. I am unsure of how fun it'd be to read when my eyes are tired, or in general. I have no problem with brown, but slightly darker?

The name section made me groan, for the colours.

Think I got it! My co-worker has used this font for wedding invitations n' stuff. It has all the versatility of Ministry without the bulbous swirls and awkward kerning. Megan suggested adding the distressed texture.

I love this new one. Nice revision process there, Daniel. It says a lot about you as a graphic designer that you're not afraid to make pretty significant changes if something isn't working.

Also, I would emphasize what Levi says. A couple of the games I've picked up lately have really slim interior margins, which is fine for saddle-stitch but really, really hard to read in casebound. Actually, come to think of it, the games I'm thinking specifically of were Mutants & Masterminds books, so even big companies with professonal layout folk who should know better make this oversight.

*Checks copy of MG* Yeah, the margins there look great. The only place they don't work as well is the very first page, where the end-paper attaches to the interior pages, which nearly cuts off part of the M in Mouse Guard. That's a really obscure problem to encounter, though, and one I would have totally missed, since I've never worked with endpapers. But I bet there are a bunch of more obscure problems you encounter when doing hardcovers.

Okay, we're gonna tinker with this a little bit more today. Megan has a crazy-ass idea. She wants me to type up all the headlines, then she'll trace over them with inkbrush so they have the same letterforms, but with less predictable line weights and less refined texture. She wants to give this a shot with the wedding-y font and the original swirly font, just to see what works better.

Meanwhile, I'm gonna move on and layout a few more spreads to see how I'm going to treat examples of play and such.

From what I've picked up about Do, you need to have some fairly organic looking curves in the design and you need to make it allude to childhood.

The thing that's nice about that latest font is the curved lines coming off it, but overall it's just a bit too baroque.
Do you not have a brushstroke-like font that's a sensible one rather than an exteme one?

The first example you put up was using too many text styles, and maybe it still is.

The capitals look OK, but are a sure way to give it a more adult feel. Especially small caps.

Further thoughts... In February, I wrote about Examples of Examples of Play and hinted at what examples of play would look like in Do. Here's an early blueprint for what I'm thinking about.


Click here to see a bunch of notes on this image.

That brush-tracing method looks hot.

I had to make some compromises with this font-to-calligraphy method, mostly because some letter combos in Ministry Script were too bulbous or overwrought. "Introduction" is too swoopy, for example, so I changed it to "Flight Prep."



What's the verdict?

Better and better. (Not just the heading, but the small changes you're making on the rest of the page.)

Guy's right about the text thickness in the main columns. I think your linebreaking settings are probably to blame, since they're squishing the text to make it fit into lines. Also, I'm not sure the horizontal lines behind the main text columns on the left are doing anything for you. They don't line up with the breaks between lines (either of the main text or the side bar on the right) and bad White Wolf design decisions have shown that putting stuff behind text doesn't usually work; even if something looks good on your screen, it may be disastrous in print. That's my only real concern, though. Otherwise, looks good to go.

So, uh, how smoothly does the game play right now? :)

That's totally cool. I feel very similarly about some of my own designs, that the layout is critical to teaching and/or playing the game. I have just been worried previously that you might rush this to press and it's such a great concept and beautiful-looking game that I'm hoping it avoids that.

I like the pseudo-caligraphy and the color scheme is better. Looks kind busy though...

"Scott: I've passed along your compliments to Megan. I feel bad for her though, she just got herself a whole bunch of work. :P"


And that's bad????

Throw me in as another who likes the new calligraphy. It's really fun.

I think part of the problem is that I've chosen one of the busier page spreads to use as an example. :P

I'm laying out the rest of the character creation chapter over the next week or two. I'll post updates as I go. :)

Hm, you know, your green brush-stroke logo is totally unrelated to the feel and color scheme of the book interior.

Shreyas: I was just noticing that myself. I'm a stickler for brand discipline though, so I don't know if it's too late to change it drastically. :\

Svante: Can you link specifically to the version you're talking about? Almost all the layouts have some blue bits in them. I'll let you knife-fight the no-hyphenation folks, though. :P

That works for "Do" but I'm actually thinking about "Pilgrims of the Flying Temple." It's a long title, which means a compressed typeface like Runic MT works great for it, but now that Runic isn't anywhere on the inside, I'm not sure what the solution would be that wouldn't make the logo look ungainly. I guess that's where design comes in. :P

Posted By: DanielSolisSvante: Can you link specifically to the version you're talking about? Almost all the layouts have some blue bits in them. I'll let you knife-fight the no-hyphenation folks, though. :P

This one: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2554/3693890475_a262668301.jpg

About hyphenation: I thought the general consensus was that you always hyphenate justified text to keep the word spacing at acceptable levels. Of course, rules are meant to be broken, and there are no hard and fast rules in graphic design, but this is something that (at least in my opinion) clearly increases readability.

Posted By: John HarperHyphenation is evil and wrong.

Just so.
(Assuming we're talking about line-end word breaks. Turn the bastards off.)

Hokay, so here's where it's at right now.

The opening spread for a chapter in Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.



The first two pages: Here you can see an overview of the character creation process.



Here you can see a breakdown of the character sheet and the first step of character creation. Each step begins with a check mark and an inset of the character sheet, noting where you should be writing the info. Also, there are frequent "Think about" questions throughout this chapter to help inspire some new ideas.



Each step ends with an example of play, as you can see on the right. The examples of play begin very simply at first, just to introduce the reader to the format.



The next few pages show the step in which you choose your pilgrim's origin. Liz Hooper is drawing different characters as examples of each Origin, some of which you can see below.





And this is a slightly longer example of play, spreading across two pages. I don't think examples of play will be much longer than this. Here you can see the example players talking back and forth as they help each other figure out their character's backgrounds.



This is an example of a more text-heavy double-page spread. Lists are called out in a sans serif font and blue type.



This is only about a quarter of the full chapter. Hoping to finish it all by Thursday before I go out of town for Friday. Liz is gonna try to finish the drawings by Saturday morning, so that'll probably be the last thing I gotta do. Saturday night is the drop-dead deadline.

No, this is totally unedited. It's just for a playtest right now, so there's gonna be a ton of errors like that. :P

So in trying to break it down into small, digestible chunks, did I make it look more complicated than it really is? Poo.

I was trying to follow the advice folks had been offering for a while: "Say what you're going to say, say it, say what you just said." Since I'm not a very good writer, I thought I could do this in the best way I knew how, by designing three different visual ways of explaining each step of the process:

• An overview at the beginning of the chapter that shows what each player is doing in each step.


• A headline that tells you what to do and support copy that elaborates on that one instruction, without adding any new instructions. The idea being that you could look at a table of contents as an overview of play, too.


• And then each step would also have the horizontal swimlane example of play, responding to some questions and comments that have come up in playtests.

When I revisit the examples of play, I was thinking about trimming some of the back-and-forth between players to make room for more text that explains what just happened. That might just be adding even more visual noise though.

Then again, after looking at some of the Nickelodeon, Disney, manga and video game magazines targeted at the YA audience, this is actually a pretty mellow and relaxed layout. :P

I'm still in the "love the look, swim lanes still not perfect" camp. For instance, why the faded, down-arrow graphics behind each row? People tend to read left-to-right and top-down anyway, without guidance arrows. The sample swim lane I showed in your other thread uses arrows because there are decision gateways that engage different entities (i.e. if Yes, lane two entity does FOO; if no, lane one entity does BAR). But arrows just to keep folks reading down the page makes a good deal of clutter, to my eyes.

And I still also agree with whomever suggested you group (box) rows where every lane has the same action, simultaneously. So even if you keep all those arrow graphic backgrounds, the multi-lane ones should be single arrows, spanning the whole width of the affected lanes.

But kill the arrows, akchully. And the checkmark bullets--they give it an "already done" not "do this" vibe. But that's just me....

I doff my cap at your attempt to do something so bold and challenging, and your bravery in sharing the process with us.

I think you're really on to something great here, which is why I'm so eager to critique and refine.

Very nicely done.

Daniel,
I found your swim lane chart in the Flight Prep spread to be very dense and a bit difficult to parse.

It'd be easier to just describe it:
Have everyone else at the table come up with a troubling situation for your character at the temple. Write down that situation. Then, the person on your left describes how their character rescues you. Record this as well.

Daniel - This stuff is kick ass! You've done a great job. You have to have experience as a graphic designer. When I look at this I think - How would this look if done in offset printing - like the D+D books. Expensive to do but that would really pull out all of the qualities of your work.

Anyway - BRAVO!

Chris Engle
hamsterpress.net

David, I think you and I are on the same wavelength.



I just combined the overview of the chapter with the breakdown of the character sheet. Worked out pretty well, I think. Also gives me an extra page to let some of the content breathe a little more.

EDIT: Just noticed that the line isn't pointing at Worldly Name. D'oh! :P